The premise of value investing is to buy securities whose shares appear underpriced by some form of analysis. Warren Buffett is the strategy’s greatest adherent and also its greatest success story.

In the past six weeks, Buffett’s MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company has been on a renewable-energy investment spree, buying up the $2 billion Topaz Solar Farm, in Southern California; a 49 percent interest in the $1.8 billion Agua Caliente solar project, in Arizona; and, last week, another wind project acquisition in Illinois, which brings the company’s wind power portfolio to $6 billion.

Europe’s ambitious project to capture solar and wind energy across Arab deserts to power homes in Europe, the Middle East and Africa inched forward Thursday despite technical and political hurdles.

Two international consortiums led by German and French industrial giants joined forces in highly complex drives to deploy solar panels and wind turbines in arid regions, and sink cables across the Mediterranean.

The two groups, Desertec Industry Initiative and Medgrid, signed a cooperation deal in Brussels on the sidelines of an EU energy ministers’ meeting, linking projects aimed at meeting 15 percent of Europe’s electricity demand by 2050.

Apple, ranked the least green of the big tech companies earlier this year, is moving quietly to repair its reputation by switching its vast east coast data centre from coal to solar power.

Local officials in North Carolina say the company is preparing to build a solar farm adjacent to its $1bn data centre in Maiden.

The facility could help Apple recover from a Greenpeace report earlier this year which said its cloud-computing operations – run from centres such as the one in North Carolina – were heavily reliant on dirty energy such as coal.

The World Bank approved $297 million in loans to Morocco to support construction and operation of Morocco’s 500-megawatt (MW) Ouarzazate Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plant, one of several large scale solar power projects in various stages of planning or development across the solar energy rich Middle East-North Africa region.

Upon completion, the Ouarzazate parabolic trough CSP plant would be one of the largest CSP plants in the world. A group of seven international lenders has committed $1.435 billion dollars to build and develop the project. Ouarzazate is seen as a key milestone for Morocco’s national Solar Power Plan, which was launched in 2009 with the goal of deploying 2000 MW of solar power generation capacity by 2020.

Facebook’s state-of-the-art data center houses awesome amounts of computing power, but the biggest technical challenge has been the air handlers.

The company said today that its Prineville, Ore., data center received LEED gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. The power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating varies between 1.06 and 1.1, making it a data center that consumes about half what a building simply built to code would use.

A Dutch artist is aiming to create an artificial leaf in the Sahara Desert that can grow a layer of ice on its underside.

‘Sunglacier’, as the project has been dubbed, will feature a 200m2 surface covered in photovoltaic solar cells, which will power cooling condensers on the underside of the elm leaf-shaped structure to soak up humidity from the desert air and turn it into ice.

Ap Verheggen, the artist behind the project, hopes it will encourage people to believe that the impossible is possible when it comes to dealing with climate change.

The world’s largest social networking site recently announced plans to utilize more renewable energy to power it’s new Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters.

Last year, Facebook was scrutinized by its users for using coal to supply the energy for its massive data centers. The company responded by reminding the public that power for its newest data center would come from multiple sources, including renewables, and would be one of the most energy efficient in the world.

IBM is bringing electric power–in the form of solar panels–to data centers with trouble getting power in the first place.

The company tomorrow will detail a pilot project that couples solar power with water-cooled servers that run on high-voltage direct current. The method results in about a 10 percent energy savings by reducing the losses that normally happen in converting from alternating power from the grid to the direct current servers run on, according to Kota Murali, the chief scientist of nanotechnology at IBM India who developed the pilot as a side project.

That level of energy reduction is significant for large data centers with many servers, but the implications of solar and servers are potentially profound for places that don’t have access to reliable power, Murali said.

Apple plans to build a solar farm next to its massive data center in Maiden, N.C., according to a Charlotte Observer report.

The company has won approval to reshape the slope of 171 acres of vacant land it owns adjacent to the data center in preparation for a data center, according to permits issued in Catawba County. However, the permit offered no details about the solar farm project itself–dubbed Project Dolphin Solar Farm– including its size, the newspaper noted.

The nimbys are mutating. Until recently the main opposition to renewable energy in the UK was directed against onshore wind turbines, along with some strong pylon-hating.

But today’s Times reveals the existence of solar farm nimbys too. You may not be able to read that story, it’s behind a paywall, but luckily it’s a pretty shameless replica of a story from the Daily Mail on Friday. It even has the same nimby, Robin Smith, who says his view of Somerset Levels has been spoiled, using exactly the same words: “It is blanket desecration of the countryside. I feel very sad that it is just for people lining their coffers.”